“I’d say just turn yourself in. Return the money. Make a full confession and…'
Chee stopped there, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. Bernie was looking at him now, and her expression said this was not the time for half-baked humor.
“Do you know Teddy Bai?”
“Bai? Is that the rent-a-cop wounded in the casino robbery?”
“Teddy’s a Montezuma County deputy sheriff,” Bernie said, rather stiffly. “That was just a part-time temporary job with casino security. He was just trying to make some extra money.”
“I wasn’t -' Chee began and stopped. Less said the better until he knew what this was all about. So he said, “I don’t know him.” And waited.
“He’s in the hospital at Farmington,” Bernie said. “In intensive care. Shot three times. Once through a lung. Once through the stomach. Once through the right shoulder.”
Clearly Bernie knew Bai pretty well. All he knew about this case personally was what he’d read in the papers, and he hadn’t seen any of these details reported. He said, “Well, that San Juan Medical Center there has a good reputation. I’d think he’d be getting -'
“They think he was involved in the robbery,” Bernie said. “I mean the FBI thinks so. They have a guard outside his room.”
Chee said, “Oh?” And waited again. If Bernie knew why they thought that, she’d tell him. What he’d read, and what he’d heard, was that the bandits had killed the casino security boss and critically wounded a guard. Then, during their escape, they’d shot at a Utah Highway Patrolman who had flagged them for speeding.
Bernie looked close to tears. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem to. Why would they want to shoot their own man?”
“They think Teddy was the inside man,” Bernie said. “They think the robbers shot him because he knew who they were, and they didn’t trust him.”
Chee nodded. He didn’t have to ask Bernie how she knew all this confidential stuff. Even if it wasn’t her case, she was a cop, and if she really wanted to know, she’d know who to talk to. “Sounds pretty weak to me,” he said. “Cap Stoner was shot, too. He was the security boss out there. You’d think they’d figure Stoner for the inside man.”
He rose, poured a cup of coffee, and handed it to Bernie, giving her a little time to think how she wanted to answer that.
“Everybody liked Stoner,” she said. “All the old-timers anyway. And Teddy’s been in trouble before,” she said. “When he was just a kid. He got arrested for joyriding in somebody else’s truck.”
“Well it couldn’t have been very serious,” Chee said. “At least the county was willing to hire him as a deputy.”
“It was a juvenile thing,” Bernie said.
“Awful weak then. Do they have something else on him?”
“Not really,” she said.
He waited. Bernie’s expression told him something worse was coming. Or maybe not. Maybe she wouldn’t tell him.
She sighed. “People at the casino said he’d been acting strange. They said he was nervous. Instead of watching people inside, he kept going out into the parking lot. When his shift was over, he stayed around. He told one of the cleanup crew he was waiting to be picked up.”
“OK,” Chee said. “I can see it now. I mean them thinking he was waiting for the gang to show up. In case they needed help.”
“He wasn’t, though. He was waiting for someone else.”
“No problem, then. When he gets well enough to talk, he tells the feds who he was waiting for. They check, confirm it, and there’s no reason to hold him,” Chee said, thinking there was probably something else.
“I don’t think he’ll tell,” Bernie said.
“Oh. You mean he was waiting for a woman then?” He didn’t pursue that. Didn’t ask her how she knew all this, or why she hadn’t passed it along to the FBI. Didn’t ask her why she had come here to tell him about it.
“I don’t know what to do,” Bernie said.
“Probably nothing,” he said. “If you do, they’ll want to know how you got this information. Then they’ll talk to his wife. Mess up his marriage.”
“He’s not married.”
